Walking along the Farmington River Trail in Canton recently I passed the back yard of a home with a cord or more of nicely stacked firewood.

Atop the stack were little bundles of slender twigs and thumb-thick branches, perhaps 15 inches in length, each held together by a few loops of sturdy string and a knot. These were the classic fire-starting kindling bundles known in England as faggots, and used for centuries to start a fire in the hearth.

A wave of guilt washed over me.

For years, I made these stick bundles myself. It was a November chore that I never felt was a chore. On a mild late-fall day, it was a pleasant thing to do. I'd roam around in the woods behind the house, gathering armfuls of dead branches, breaking them into lengths of maybe 15 to 16 inches. No need to be too exacting about the length, they just need to fit in the fireplace or woodstove.

Next, I'd fashion a big handful of the twigs into a bunch and tie it up. Last step was to pile them neatly, protected from the elements, ready to grab to start a fire.

It got me outdoors, where I prefer to be anyway, and it even amounted to a little light exercise.

It also was a thoroughly frugal, Yankee kind of thing to do. You can, of course, walk into any hardware store or supermarket today and buy a box of commercial fire starter bricks for $15 or $20, made of stuff like sawdust and wax. I've done it. I did it a month ago.

The commercial ones really are unnecessary, though, when you can so easily prepare your own. A little newsprint, a stick bundle and a match and the logs in your hearth or woodstove will catch fire nicely.

Hence the guilt. With my children grown and flown, I no longer can claim I am too busy to gather my own kindling and fuss with it a bit.

Given the enormously damaging storms of the past two years that brought down so many trees and limbs, there is an abundance of small branches and twigs almost anywhere you find trees. Virtually all of them are brittle and dry now, ready for harvest. If there is a year to make stick bundles, this is it.

Helen and Scott Nearing, who abandoned city life in 1932 to live a simpler, rural life, became, in the early 1970s, the gurus of the back-to-the-land movement that was the rage. They made stick bundles.

The Nearings, who strived to be self-sufficient first in rural Vermont, later in rural Maine, made their stick bundles in two sizes — kindling size, and a slightly larger size made of branches up to an inch-and-a-half in diameter.

"If well made and dry, the faggots burn as readily as paper and are almost surefire with the first match," they wrote in "Continuing the Good Life," one of their two homesteading classics, still in print.

"We know of no other American homesteader who goes to the trouble of making up these faggots," they wrote. Maybe the homesteaders were otherwise too busy, and maybe not everybody makes them in two sizes, but stick bundles were something many people prepared once upon a time. But, surely, far fewer people make them now.

Gladys Taber, who wrote a series of hugely popular books from her rural home in Southbury in the latter half of the 20th Century, had a slightly different approach, a stick bundle shortcut.

"I collect small fallen branches all year for kindling," she wrote in "Stillmeadow Calendar." "They really should be tied in bundles, but I am not that kind of person. I toss them in cartons and fish them out in handfuls as needed."

I tie mine up. I am that kind of person. And I need to get back to doing so, before the next snow fall.